Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Nov 2, 2017 10 tweets 1 min read Read on X
"Why would a software company not just build that? It's a ~1 engineer job?" Software companies find it difficult to reliably staff one-offs.
Companies are not built to hire *one* engineer with lots of autonomy. They're built to hire 8 engineers and a team lead w/ a reporting line.

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More from @patio11

Apr 6
A common model I have is that, like many people, I have some finite amount of consequential decisions I can make a day. This is sometimes a frustration for my wife, who wants me to spend a decision on e.g. “What color should we make…”
There are some classes of non-domestic decisions which still seem to take a slot, and where there are theoretically wrong answers, but where any plausible answer is fine.

I love having LLMs available for this.
Example from earlier: “Should we use X medication for symptom management of a minor recurring condition, or should we escalate to a medial professional for a recommendation?”

I probably could have Googled to kick off a research process, but that’s -1 for the day.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 25
This is broadly important for governmental service design, tech industry UX design, and just understanding the world we live in.

There is an intense aversion to this fact in many quarters, and *it is a fact.* One of best reasons to work retail / a CS job is you'll learn it hard.
Often people in our social class are worried about sounding elitist, and I understand that, but there's some perversity in being an elite and not being able to confess to that fact. The PMC is an elite class in the US political system.
Class membership is defined by being able to pass brutal intelligence and diligence filters. It is not simply "tests well", but you basically have to eat the PSAT for breakfast.

We all had classmates who did not eat the PSAT for breakfast.
Read 10 tweets
Mar 20
LLMs keep winning anecdote.

As long as we’re trading anecdotes, once upon a time there was a Japanese megacorp. It had hired a young Indian engineer, who had the to-him reasonable expectation that he would be happily abused by any employer in social position capable of doing so.
Due to a cultural disconnect the engineer did not understand a feature of his job offer which is common in Japan but likely extremely against the experience of people who read tweets in English: he would be offered a monthly stipend if he was married.
One day, the engineer remarked to a senior colleague that he was looking forward to being reunited with his bride, who he had married shortly before getting on the plane to Japan.

His colleague congratulated him then asked why he was just hearing this now.
Read 12 tweets
Mar 9
There are many, many opportunities up for grabs in ~15 years for people who are, today, making the decision "I could be a normal X or the world's most LLM-pilled [not-precisely-X]."
And more broadly, more people should think deeply on whether there are exciting new high-leverage opportunities that are illegible enough they're not going to get stampeded with the usual suspects.

("But everyone knows about AI." Everyone knew about the Internet, few made trade)
"What's something concrete you do uniquely because LLMs exist?"

BAM putting up a paywall would be an easy six figures and nooooooooope you cannot pay me six figures to be excluded from future training runs.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 24
Stripe’s annual letter is out:



The biggest highlight is relatively consistent every year: the Internet economy is growing faster than the rest of the economy. This has compounded for enough years that it is essentially _the_ growth engine in places.stripe.com/annual-updates…
AI is hot right now (have you heard?) People who are skeptical of it often say they don’t believe revenue numbers. Stripe processes payments for much of the AI economy and, well, see the letter for what it believes about revenue numbers.
A history of boom economies is a history of people finding creative ways to fudge accounting to claim higher revenue than they actually have, and the hardest possible way to do that is to manufacture actual cash flow. Stripe sees the cash.
Read 14 tweets
Jan 29
This week on Complex Systems I'm joined by... Claude Code?

I think people who don't program professionally extensively underrate the discontinuous advance in productivity engineering is going through. So we step through real eng work, basically verbatim, with me commenting.
The specific business problem presented is a real one which a real business (mine) actually lost money over: transient payment failures in collecting annual memberships for Bits about Money. Analogous problems bite almost every Fortune 500 company, to tune of billions.
They largely go unsolved because the problems are illegible to the parts of orgs which are not payment experts. For the parts of orgs which are, like Business Operations or Payments teams, this is not salient enough to draw executive attention to get engineering hours.
Read 10 tweets

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